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Comment by voakbasda | Hacker News Reader

Do you hate open source and want only projects where their authors can afford liability insurance and are willing to put themselves in the firing line of a legal system that can be both arbitrary and capricious? Because that’s what you seem to want.

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Even people selling on the street or doing charity work have to account for liability of their actions.

Lets stop talking about open source as special snowflakes where everything is excused.

And that’s how you prevent bake sales, lemonade stands, and more. You create a barrier to entry that gets raised little by little until only the biggest players can afford the game. Software liability would end all small open source projects.

Bake sales and lemonade stands are perfectly fine as long as people don't land on hospital urgency, due to careless work on preparing them with spoiled ingredients or lack of hygiene.

Lets strive for quality in software.

Now do that again without careless work or spoiled ingredients. Do you still want them punished or facing so much regulation they can't exist? Because you'll definitely get that with software; even really good development will have flaws, and single flaws can lead to a thousand or million hacks.

All humans face scrutiny in their interactions with others.

Software only got this bad, because we educated users broken tools are acceptable and fixable with computer reboots and anti-virus.

I dunno, people seem to accept most kinds of tool being fussy or flaky.

But the special thing about security flaws is that they turn a one in a billion error into a guaranteed attack. It's moderately hard to make something that doesn't feel buggy, but ridiculously hard to be secure. If you hold to the standards of a bake sale it's the former. If you want full security then nobody releases anything outside very strict contracts.

Thankfully industry is changing,

- https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32...

- https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/News-Highlights/Article/Artic...

And I could keep listing several other world regions.

The problem is it's literally speech. Selling something isn't speech, you do not have the right to do charity work or run a business. It goes even beyond speech, it's closer to pure math/logic and I feel very uncomfortable about regulating that. I also think it's literally impossible.

Speech is subject to laws in most jurisdictions.

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